The Black Dog Follows
by Aconitum-Napellus
Summary: No slash. No sex. "Even poetic girls with dusty hands and bare feet and a name like Mallory must have come from somewhere." Driving through Dakota, Buz and Tod come across a stray dog that leads them to a tumbledown house and a girl with a secret.
1. Chapter 1

No company's more hateful than your own

You dodge and give yourself the slip; you seek

In bed or in your cups from care to sneak

In vain: the black dog follows you and hangs

Close on your flying skirts with hungry fangs.

Conington J (transl.) (1863) The satires, epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace (London: George Bell & Sons), p.90. _Horace_ (65–8 BC)

Sometimes, in some places, they weren't seeking anything, weren't chasing a dream, had no evening bed in mind. Sometimes they were just driving and wondering what the next town would be and if there would be jobs for two drifters who loved moving more than staying. It wasn't always easy getting casual work, but in the end there was always someone who was glad of two pairs of hands with no strings attached.

Right now they were somewhere in the Midwest, somewhere where the land stretched out to the horizon and blended into the sky like two galaxies in a loving collision. Sometimes Buz looked out at the road ahead and felt like when they reached the edge they would just drop a gear and pull up into the sky – but that never happened. The road always curved on, always dropping just over the edge of the world, running down to some place or another – and sooner or later something would cross their path to make life interesting again.

They first saw it out ahead of them, a speck far down the road, something dark and moving with steady purpose. The sun was setting in the west and the creature was in the west too, a blurred spot against the slanting light, too low to be a man, to swift to be a child.

The Corvette purred closer and Buz shaded his eyes with his hand, cutting out the low fingers of evening light.

'Hey, it's a dog,' he said curiously.

Tod's eyebrows rose. 'What's a dog doing all the way out here? We're miles from anywhere.'

He looked to the left and the right as he drove. The land was a place of shallow undulations and blowing grass and not much else but a few stands of trees every now and then. There were no people, no rivers, no other roads. There was no one to take care of a dog out here.

Buz shrugged, watching the dog through his shaded eyes. 'There was a dame back in Hell's Kitchen – old Mrs Kiedrowski – she used to shudder every time the neighbour's black dog put its nose into her baker's store. Said it was like death coming over her. A bad omen.'

'An omen of what?' Tod laughed acerbically. 'I thought that was supposed to be black cats?'

Buz shook his head, remembering the real fear in Mrs Kiedrowski's eyes. 'You know. The dark hound. The incubus on your chest. The unknown threat. You're the college graduate – I thought you'd be the one who knew all that jazz.'

Tod laughed again. 'I've never been big on superstition. It's just a dog,' he said, gesturing as they drew closer. 'Just a poor old dog, making its way somewhere. Look,' he said, 'He's limping, poor old fella.'

Buz peered forward again and saw it too – the dog picking up its front paw and hardly letting it touch the road. It was keeping up a good pace, considering. He pressed his lips together in concern, looking from the dog to Tod and back again.

'Hey, maybe we should stop,' he said. 'Just to see it's all right.'

'If it was up to you, we'd pick up every orphan and stray on the road,' Tod said, but all the same he turned the wheel a little as they drew up to the creature, pulling the car out and dropping his speed so that they were travelling alongside. The dog kept running, its left front paw barely touching the ground, its tongue hanging out and its dark eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead.

Buz draped his hand over the side of the car. 'Hey, buddy,' he said in a low voice, tapping his fingers lightly on the door.

The dog snapped him a look, and then turned away again, disinterested. Buz reached down between his feet and brought out a flask.

'Hey, old fella,' he said, shaking the container so the water splashed inside.

This time the dog looked for longer. Tod let the car roll to a stop and the dog stopped too. Buz opened the door cautiously, for, tired as it was, the dog was big and powerful looking. Its long black hair was matted and dusty, but he had no illusions that its teeth would not be effective.

The dog sat down, resting its haunches on the hot road, and Buz knelt too, pouring a little water into the palm of his hand.

'Here, fella,' he said. 'Have a drink.'

The dog drank as if it had not seen water for days. Buz looked up at Tod, concerned.

'I think we should take it in to the next town,' he said. 'I mean, there might be some place we can take it there. A pound or a – a friendly veterinarian. Someone who can take care of it.'

Tod looked left and right up the road and then got out of the car himself, coming around to kneel before the dog.

'Hey, old boy,' he said, stroking a hand down the dog's chest, making tentatively for that lame front paw. 'Let's have a look.'

The dog whimpered a little but it let Tod lift its paw from the ground and look at the pad.

'There,' Tod said in triumph, drawing something from between the toes. 'Like Androcles and the lion,' he said, holding up a long, dark thorn. 'You – er – have heard of Androcles and the lion, street urchin as you are?' he prodded mischievously.

'Yeah, I've heard of Androcles and the lion,' Buz nodded. He could see the words of the story in his mind as he spoke, written in fading print on a yellowing page. 'Gratitude is the sign of noble souls,' he quoted as the dog licked at Tod's hand. 'All that jazz.'

'Well, well, well,' Tod grinned. 'You listened in class after all.'

Buz laughed. 'Actually it was that Mrs Kiedrowski – the lady I told you about. When I was seven she gave me a book of Aesop's Fables. I mean, it was only an old, battered thing. Her own kid had grown out of it. But she gave it to me. It was _mine_, you know. I used to read that every night.'

'Well, there's one thing,' Tod said, looking the dog up and down again. 'Our lion's not a boy – she's a girl. Her teats are engorged. Looks like she must have pups.'

'Oh, geez,' Buz said, shaking his head, imagining a nest of puppies out here somewhere with a limping, bedraggled mother who could barely look after them. 'Well, we can't take her to any pound or vet surgery, then. First we need to find the pups.'

Tod gave him a long-suffering look. 'One dog in the middle of the prairie, and we have to happen on it and save it, huh?' he asked.

'Yeah,' Buz nodded decisively. 'That's right. It's called karma, see. We help the dog, and something helps us. We don't help the dog – '

He looked up at Tod and watched and waited. They were equal partners in this journey, but he always ended up asking Tod for permission in some way or another over things like this. Things like chasing stray dogs across the prairie and taking stray dogs in his car. Those wheels were Tod's wheels, and he could drive off into the sunset if he wanted to.

'Okay, we'll help the dog,' Tod said eventually. He put his hand to the animal's chin, looking it straight in its dark eyes. 'It's your call, dog. Lead us where you will.'

'You think she understands you?' Buz asked with a smile – but the dog got up and looked first at Tod and then at Buz – and then started walking purposefully down the road again.

They crawled along the road at a snail's pace – or at a dog's pace, at least. Buz sat watching the dog with his elbow resting on the car door and his chin on his hand, wondering just how far it had to go. After half a mile a dusty track branched from the metalled road and the dog took it.

'Well, Dr Dolittle. Does the dog say _follow_?' Buz asked, nodding down the track.

'The dog says _follow_,' Tod nodded, and Buz laughed quietly. Once Tod got his mind set on an idea he could be as determined as Buz.

'You know, it's going to be dark soon,' Buz reminded him. The sun was almost touching the horizon now, a great ball of melting flame that was spreading golds and reds into the grasses.

Tod shrugged. 'We've got food, water, bedrolls, and we've always got the means for fire,' he laughed, tapping the half-empty packet of Malboros in his pocket. 'We can camp if need be.'

Buz settled back in his seat again, watching the prairie crawl past. It felt as if they were in a boat as the car rolled slowly up and down the swells after the dog. The grass stretched out on all sides, glinting with fall browns and golds and mauves and greens that blended together into a swaying whole that made him think of a dry sea.

'I wonder if that's it,' he murmured as the silhouette of a tumbledown structure appeared in a small stand of trees. 'What is that? A house? A barn?'

'Looks like an old house to me,' Tod said, peering forward. 'I guess there always were farming families living out in places like this.'

Buz looked around himself. 'Forty miles from the nearest town?' he asked. 'I mean, how did they survive?'

He shivered. He couldn't say that he had enjoyed the orphanage that had pulled him up, but he had loved the streets, the buildings with windows like eyes and walls like the rocky sides of canyons. Cars had flowed like water down the rivers of the streets and trees had been blackened things struggling to push up to the sky with initials carved into their bark. He had felt secure that whatever happened, he would be able to survive somehow, even if it was by huddling up behind a dumpster somewhere on a bed of cardboard and scrounging food from garbage cans. This kind of wideness and emptiness seemed a strange place to live.

'It's a farm, Buz,' Tod said tolerantly. 'They'd have a well for water, a garden for vegetables, a cow for milk – and horses and a wagon for getting where they wanted to go. What do you think people did before there were stores selling you everything you think you need?'

'If it's a farm, where are the barns?' Buz pointed out, gesturing at the tangle of tree trunks and undergrowth. There were no other structures obvious in the mess apart from the house that had been half destroyed by time.

'Oh, they probably crumbled into the ground long ago,' Tod said, but he sounded disconcerted all the same. 'There's probably a hump or a bump hereabouts, and that's all that's left of the home of faithful old Betty or Daisy or Spot or whatever they might have called her.'

Buz laughed, but he looked curiously at the old house. Tod put on the headlights and suddenly the surrounding land seemed to be swallowed up in darkness. As they approached the lights reflected from dirty and cracked windows, and lit up whitewashed boards that had long since dimmed with grime and mould. The house looked more like a town house whipped up by a tornado and deposited here than something that had been built by homesteaders long ago.

'You don't like places like this, do you, Buz?' Tod asked him, looking at him appraisingly.

'It's not that I don't like them exactly,' Buz replied. 'I mean, give me the open road and some space about me and I'm happy. How's that song go?_ Give me lots of land… the starry sky above. Don't fence me in. _I mean, I don't dig the style but the sentiment's all there, you know.'

'As long as there's a store within ten miles, huh?'

'As long as there's a pair of wheels beneath me and somewhere to go to,' Buz amended. 'I dig this kind of place, but I don't want to live here. I mean, where are the girls, for a start?'

Tod laughed, nodding towards the house. 'Maybe they're in there. Maybe there's a whole secret school of private secretaries just waiting for you. Why don't we follow the dog and see, huh?'

As the car slowed to a stop the dog looked round at them, suddenly quivering with anxiety. She whimpered and ran to the car door, looking between Buz and the house. He took a flashlight from the glove box and got out of the car.

'Leave the headlights on, will you,' he said uneasily to Tod. There was something reassuring about those pools of light.

'You want me to keep an eye out for omens and ghosts?' Tod asked as he joined him.

'Very funny,' Buz said.

The dog walked on towards the house and Buz followed, holding the flashlight half ready to turn on and half ready to strike any unexpected assailant over the head. It was warm and quiet, and there was almost no noise but their footsteps on the dry undergrowth and the dog padding ahead.

The door to the house hung open, the hinges half rusted away. Once there had been a glass pane in it that had smashed and lay in angular shards on the ground. The dog walked inside as if it were walking into its own home, and looked back at the two men.

'Maybe the pups are in here,' Buz murmured, flashing his light about the room. It was a strange, eerie place, like a shipwreck without the water, possessions and furniture scattered as if slewed by outside forces, eaten by damp and rodents' teeth. The dog made its way to another door near an old wooden staircase, and walked through.

Tod and Buz followed. The air smelt of musty cloth and old wood and mould, and somewhere a scent of urine came and went. Buz put his head around the door and shone the light through, and then sucked in his breath sharply.

'What is it?' Tod asked, pushing to see past Buz's shoulder.

'You know I said, _where are the girls?_' Buz said.

He shone the light at the corner of the room. In it there was an ancient wing-backed chair, and sitting there, knees hunched up to her chest and her hair falling darkly about her face, was a woman.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

Buz stepped forward carefully into the room, suddenly very aware of the crunching of detritus under his feet and the feeling of pushing into someone else's space. This was not just an abandoned house any more. Whatever the actual ownership was, this girl was here first. Small as she was in the dark corner, curled in the chair, she looked like either she belonged to the room or the room belonged to her.

'Er – hello,' Buz began cautiously.

He lifted the flashlight to shine it at an oblique angle toward the woman. He didn't want to dazzle her. The light shone from tattered wallpaper with a repetitive leafy print and glinted on the unbrushed strands of the woman's hair.

'We're – sorry to bust in on you,' Buz continued when she didn't reply. 'The dog kinda led us here.'

She didn't move, but her eyes turned to the dog, which had come to sit beside the armchair as if it had returned to its lord and master, with its head resting on the stained silk fabric of the seat. The girl's eyes lingered on the dog's head and then her gaze drifted away again.

Buz glanced at Tod in concern. He took another step forward and tried again.

'We were worried about the dog, see. She seemed to want us to come. We thought she might have a litter somewhere.'

This time the girl's eyes lifted up and Buz saw them clearly, so dark that they were almost black, and somehow empty of life.

'They're all out there,' she said, nodding vaguely to her left where a dirty sash window sat with darkness pressing against the panes. 'Six of them like blind things, lying together. Children in a cradle. Russian dolls. I don't know what went wrong. I couldn't see a breath of life in any of them.'

She held up her hands and Buz saw that her palms and fingers were dark with dried dirt, her fingernails ragged and chipped.

'I buried them like the children of Pompeii. Six babies together all in the dirt.'

Buz looked at Tod again. He had no idea what to say.

'Are you all right?' Tod asked without preamble. 'I mean, you're out here alone, miles from anywhere. At least – I guess you're alone?'

'Oh yes,' she said, looking up toward the ceiling. There were flakes and strands of paper hanging down as if torn by a curious child. 'Just me. Me, and the black dog that follows. We're like a team, she and I. I'm a planet and she's an asteroid caught in the gravity. I can't shake her off. She brings me creatures to cook and I haul her water from the well.'

She sat staring at the dog for a moment, and then stirred herself again.

'It's a symbiosis of sorts, I suppose. I wanted to be alone, but we're never really alone, are we?' she asked, looking up. 'Not as long as we're conscious?'

'What was that you said about a while back, Tod?' Buz asked, looking at his friend. 'Parataxic distortion. The me I see and the me you see and the me I want to be, all pushing for space in the same room – and that's not to mention all the yous I see and the mes you see…'

'There is that,' Tod said dryly, looking about the room and seeing an old wooden chair nearby. He brushed dirt off the seat and sat down. 'But right now I see you and me and a dog and – ' He looked at the girl directly. 'Do you have a name?'

She nodded. She was rubbing her hands together in her lap, trying to brush the dirt off, scraping it out from beneath her fingernails and letting it fall to the ground in a dry rain.

'Do you – er – want to tell us it?' Buz said, taking a step forward. 'I mean, talk's cheap. I'll give you mine for free if you like. Buz Murdock. This is my buddy Tod Stiles.'

She looked up abruptly again and Buz was struck by the strangeness of her eyes. There was something in them, like a story tightly closed between the blank covers of a book. He wanted to find a way to open the pages, but right now he didn't even know the title of the story.

'What's your name?' he asked more softly, sitting down near Tod. She had seemed startled by his manner of speaking before.

'Mallory,' she said finally, pushing her hair behind her ears with a hesitant hand and giving a half-apologetic smile.

'Malory?' Tod echoed. 'Your parents were fans of Le Morte d'Arthur?'

She shook her head and her hair fell down around her face again. 'George Herbert Leigh Mallory,' she intoned flatly. 'My pappa expected a boy, but mamma gave him a girl. He had this big book of explorers and climbers and all those things. Green cloth covers. Pictures inside in true colour. He never went anywhere in his life, dear soul, but he did love reading about snowy peaks and storms coming down…'

'George Herbert Leigh Mallory,' Buz repeated, looking at Tod. The name felt familiar in his mouth. He remembered books at school, perhaps something like the girl had described, with colour and black and white photographs of men swaddled in winter clothing. 'What was he – the guy who went to the Antarctic, or – '

'The guy who went up Mount Everest and never came down,' Tod said immediately. 'Scott was the guy who went to the Antarctic.'

'Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Mawson,' the girl began to recite. 'Gerlache, Bruce, Borchgrevink, Charcot, Shirase, Drygalski, Nordenskiöld…'

She trailed off as if she were a gramophone that had run out of power. Buz sat and watched her, fascinated. She showed no interest in the names. She simply knew them, and was repeating them by rote, as if she were counting off beads on a rosary.

'Look – er – do you need any help?' Tod asked after the silence had lingered on for too long. 'I mean, we were just driving by and we followed the dog. We thought it needed help. It took us to you. _Do_ you need help?'

The girl stood slowly from the chair, unfolding herself like someone who had been sleeping for a long time and was finally waking up. Buz saw dark and dirty jeans and a v-necked jumper that might have been black, the skin of her chest a pale and surprising white above it. Her feet were bare, the soles blackened with dirt.

'I only came here to sit,' she said, looking about the room, her eyes fixing on those things that were lit up by the flashlight and then jerking away again. 'Just to sit and wait and see if I could escape from myself. Nothing more than that.'

'Look, you can't escape from yourself by running away, and you can't do it by sitting down, either,' Buz said. 'I mean, you're you. You're all around yourself. You can't get away from it.'

He spoke more shortly than he meant to. He was made uneasy by this whole situation – this house that felt like it was hung with ghosts and memories, with the dark outside and the bright pools of light where the car headlights and the flashlight reached, the black dog that sat by the chair and didn't move and this girl who was so strange and pale and seemed to speak without meaning to.

The girl looked at him, and a haunted smile touched the corners of her mouth. Then she crumpled to the floor like a rag doll dropped by a small child.

All thoughts of unease were pushed out of Buz's mind. He dropped to his knees beside her, touching his fingers to her neck. Her pulse was fluttering close to the surface of her skin, but she was cold and her breathing was slow and tired.

'You think she fainted?' he asked Tod urgently, tapping her cheeks lightly with his fingers in an attempt to rouse her.

'She looks like she hasn't eaten properly in days,' Tod said as he came to kneel on the other side of the girl's limp body. 'Look, Buz, take that flashlight and see if there's anywhere we can put her. This place seems to have all the furniture still. Maybe there's a bed. The stairs look sound. Have a look upstairs.'

Buz nodded and got to his feet. The headlights of the Corvette gave enough light for Tod to see by. He went back out to where the wooden stairs rose up and began to climb them cautiously, testing each tread to be sure it was sound.

Upstairs the house was just as dilapidated, but the floors seemed sound. The boards creaked beneath his feet but none gave way. A carpet half eaten by rodents and insects covered the landing. Buz flashed the light ahead – and saw a figure there, dark and indistinct, moving toward him. He gave an instinctive yell, jumping backwards. The figure jumped backwards too, and relief poured over him as he realised it was himself in a tarnished mirror.

'Steady, Buz,' he murmured to himself, and his voice sounded strange in the silence.

He reached out to the closest door and pushed it open. The room inside looked like a child's room. There was a narrow bed near the wall and a chest of drawers opposite, and old and broken toys all around. There was something about it, though. The bed did not look abandoned. It looked as if it had been slept in. The toys, although they were old, had been arranged carefully along the walls and on top of the chest of drawers. The room was definitely used.

On the chest of drawers, between an old doll and a stack of books, was an oil lamp. Buz looked at it, considering. The brass was relatively clean and the glass chimney a little sooty, but not dusty, and oil splashed inside when he tilted it. He struck a match and lit the lamp and a warm light shone out into the room.

He made his way back to the room downstairs.

'Still out, huh?' he asked as he reached Tod, looking at the girl on the floor. 'Upstairs is fine,' he said, nodding up at the ceiling. 'There's a bed up there. Looks like she's been sleeping here for a while.'

'Well, she'll be better off up there,' Tod said. 'If you carry her up I'll go sort out the car – turn the headlights off and get some of that food out of there. I mean, it looks like we'll be staying here overnight, at least.'

'You don't think maybe we should take her to a hospital?' Buz asked doubtfully.

'Somehow I don't think she'd thank us for that,' Tod said. 'She looked – I don't know – as if she really meant to be here.'

'Okay,' Buz said. 'Just – er – don't be too long with the car, will you?'

Tod laughed. 'I'll be back in a few minutes,' he promised, 'and then I can protect you from all the things that go bump in the night. But around here I think they're more likely to be boards falling from the walls than ghosties and ghoulies.'

Buz made a face at Tod and then turned back to the girl.

'You take the flashlight,' he said. 'Light me up the stairs and then I'll be fine. There's a lamp I lit up there. It's all very homely,' he said with an edge of sarcasm. 'Right down to the dolls with rouged cheeks and Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales of Shakespeare on the shelf.'

The girl murmured a little as he pushed his arms beneath her, but she did not open her eyes. He lifted her, expecting to need to put effort into straightening up, but she was lighter than he had imagined.

'You're right about the not eating,' he said, looking down at her tilted back head and the sharp angles of her jaw bone. 'She doesn't weigh much more than a feather pillow.'

Tod gazed on the girl for a moment, something indefinable passing behind his eyes – and then he nodded and turned the flashlight toward the doorway. Buz walked ahead of him, picking his way carefully over the rubbish-strewn ground, turning sideways to carry the girl through the door and then going cautiously up the stairs, still alert for any sound of wood giving way.

Tod waited for him to reach the warm pool of light shedding out of the room upstairs, and then turned away.

'Be back in a minute,' he said. 'And I'll fix us something to eat and something to drink. I think she needs it.'

Buz nodded. He waited for a moment at the top of the stairs as Tod left the house, then turned to the left and carried the limp girl into the bedroom. He laid her down on the bed and pressed her earth-smudged hand between his, letting the chill of her fingers leach out into his skin. It wasn't cold in the room. It was far from it. But she had seemed to lose all of her body heat with fainting. He began to arrange her on the bed, taking the pillow from under her head and using it to elevate her feet, folding the blankets carefully over her until she was covered up to her neck.

There was a scrabbling behind him and he turned sharply to see the dog there, sitting on the floor behind him, her tail wagging softly in the dust.

'What are you doing? Trying to give me heart failure?' he muttered.

The dog stared back at him with a look of hope in her eyes.

'I don't know what you expect,' he said, reaching out to ruffle the fur on the creature's head. 'I haven't got any food.'

The dog slumped and rolled over onto her back, baring her chest and stomach. Buz felt a sudden pang of sadness as he saw her teats, full and oozing a little milk as she writhed in hope of being stroked again.

'You lost the whole lot, huh?' he asked gently, tickling the dog carefully on the smooth, almost bare, skin of its stomach. 'Poor old girl.'

He looked sideways at the unconscious girl in the bed, and back at the dog again.

'You haven't been feeding _her_, have you?' he asked on a whim. 'Doing a Romulus and Remus thing? I mean, you went and fetched us to help, didn't you?'

'Talking to animals is the first sign of madness, you know,' Tod said from behind him.

Buz scratched the dog again, and shook his head. 'Isn't that talking to yourself, or hairs on your palms, something like that?'

'It all counts toward the whole,' Tod said. He was carrying their tightly rolled sleeping bags under his arms. He dropped them on the floor and said, 'I've brought some food in too, and I found that well she said about. There's a range in the kitchen. If I can't get it lit for cooking I can probably set a fire on the hotplate, at least. Doesn't look like they were every set up for electricity here. There's no sign of a generator anywhere, no switches.'

He moved past Buz and went to the girl in the bed, bending down to look at her. He touched his hand to the side of her head and she stirred, moaning softly.

'I think she's sleeping,' he said. 'She looks worn out. I wonder how long she's been here, how she got here? Do you think she walked all the way out here?'

Buz shrugged. 'I don't know. She doesn't look like she came from any place, or like she's going any place. She looks like she's always been here.'

'Everyone comes from somewhere,' Tod said. 'Even poetic girls with dusty hands and bare feet and a name like Mallory must have come from somewhere.'


	3. Chapter 3

3.

The dawn light was a thin, golden thing, pressing obliquely through the window and hitting the wall opposite in a steady patch of brightness. Buz lay there for some minutes watching it through half-closed eyes, making out patterns in the shadows of dirt that had been thrown onto the wall along with the dawn.

Slowly he began to feel the solidity of the floor underneath him, the uncomfortable hardness of the boards against his hip and shoulder and the rucked up thinness under his head of a folded bit of cloth that had served as a pillow.

'I'm too old for this,' he murmured, rubbing a hand over his face. But then, he wasn't sure he had ever been young enough for sleeping on the floor. He had always preferred a soft mattress beneath him and plenty of blankets over him.

He shuffled in his sleeping bag, and suddenly something warm and damp licked across his face and he blinked, smelling and seeing _dog_ all at once.

'Get off,' he muttered, pushing the dog away. 'I'm awake. Get off me.'

It took him that long to remember exactly where he was, and why. He sat up, looking around himself with bleary eyes. The dog stared back in silent interest. They had decided last night to stay in the room with Mallory in case she woke or needed help. He had fallen asleep on the floor of that small child's room, covered to the neck in his sleeping bag. Not far away Tod was lying too, still fast asleep, his head turned away and his sandy hair the only part of him visible.

This room looked different in the light. It looked somehow more homely, despite the decay and years of abandonment that had left it in such a state. He could see that although the paper on the walls was faded and dirty and the painted board floor was engrained with dust, the surfaces had been wiped briefly clean, the books were stacked neatly, the toys arranged with a loving hand. Just the fact that the morning sunlight gave proper colours to everything helped to normalise the place. He couldn't imagine ghosts or spirits emerging from the walls now.

He looked around for the girl who must have done all that cleaning and tidying – and saw that the narrow bed at the side of the room was empty.

At that Buz jerked into a panicked wakefulness, looking around in confusion. The girl wasn't anywhere in the room, but the blankets on the bed were mussed and rumpled. He slipped out of the sleeping bag, looking around again. Tod was so deep in sleep that he thought nothing short of an air raid siren would wake him. He left him there and ran downstairs lightly on bare feet, the dog close on his heels.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he froze. He could hear someone humming quietly. He cocked his ear, listening. It was an almost tuneless humming with a song rising occasionally out of the low notes. There was a door by the foot of the stairs and it was from there that he could hear the noise. Accompanying it were sporadic sounds of metal on metal and the soft movement of feet on the floor.

He pushed open the door and saw a kitchen that he had not been into last night, complete with a black iron range and an old wooden table and chairs. And there was the girl, standing barefooted in front of the range with a pan on top of it and something frying within.

'Er – Mallory,' he said cautiously.

She looked round, and he suddenly remembered that he was wearing nothing but a half-unbuttoned shirt and underpants, having shed the rest of his clothes last night before settling down to sleep.

'Oh, don't worry about that,' she said, seeing his embarrassment and nodding down at his bare legs. 'It's only flesh, after all. We're all clothed in it in the end – and at the start, too, I suppose. We're all naked in the womb…'

'You don't worry about it – I do,' Buz said firmly.

He slipped back through the door and ran quickly upstairs to find his pants, then reappeared in the kitchen tucking in his shirt and running a hand through his hair to smooth it down.

'I found the food that your friend brought in,' the girl said in the strange, indifferent tone that she had. 'You don't mind?'

'No, not at all. Not at all,' he shrugged. He couldn't possibly refuse this thin and lonely looking girl the food that they had brought with them.

Buz stepped further forward into the kitchen, looking around at the homely kitchen cupboards and the cups still hung on pegs beneath them. The place looked as if it had been abandoned all of a sudden, not left when the owners moved away.

'How long have you been here, Mallory?' he asked with deep curiosity. 'I mean – what are you doing? Are you hiding out here? Running away? Hiding from something or someone?'

'Hiding from someone or something,' she repeated thoughtfully. 'But the black dog hangs on you, doesn't it? It follows you wherever you go. You said last night, didn't you, that you can't run away from yourself? I half-hoped that wasn't true – but here I am, still inside myself, still in front of myself. I'm still here, large as life.'

Buz stared at her. Her hand shuffled the pan on the stove and a scent of bacon rose into the air, making his mouth water. She wasn't looking at the pan at all, though – just gazing steadily at him with her hair like dark curtains on either side of her face.

'We're all here,' he said. 'You can try to fool yourself or tell yourself things are different, but you still have to wake up to yourself every morning.'

'Yes,' Mallory said simply, her eyes turning back to the stove.

'You – said the dog had pups, and you buried them,' Buz remembered.

She nodded, looking down at the dog that had followed Buz into the kitchen. She was sitting looking hopefully at the stove top, saliva oozing from between black lips at the scent of the bacon.

'I don't know who was here first, she or I,' Mallory said thoughtfully. 'She bedded down in a corner and I found her there. Six pups, all stillborn, her eyes still glazed with labour. They were blind, you know. Still damp. They looked like moles. Their proper home was in the ground. I dug a hole and I put them to bed.'

'With your hands?' Buz asked, looking pointedly at her fingers and her chipped and broken nails.

'With my hands and a piece of metal I found under the old – '

There was something wrong with her voice. She sounded as if she were choking on something thick and hard. And suddenly she was pressed against Buz's chest, sobbing, her shoulders shaking against him. He put his hands to her back instinctively, feeling the sharpness of her shoulder blades and the beading of her spine through the thin black sweater that she wore. She leaned on him like a tree pushed by the wind, and shook, her sobs almost silent.

'Hey,' he said softly, uncertain as to what to do with this shivering, sobbing stranger. 'Hey, they were only dogs, you know. You did everything you could for them. You did your best.'

She didn't reply – only shook against him still. He could feel his shirt becoming wet where her face was pressed against him. She smelt of earth and growing things, of the sweat of sleep and something – he breathed in deeply – something like the iron scent of blood was somewhere beneath it all. He stroked a hand over the back of her head, trying to rationalise the deep, fearful concern he felt for her. He could feel knots and tangles in her hair, as if she had not brushed it in days, and he wondered how far she had run and how much she had turned away from herself into order to escape herself.

'Hey,' he said quietly again, resting his hands on her back. There was more to this than six dead puppies. No one could cry so deeply and so long about something like that. 'Come on. Do you want to tell me about it?'

She stiffened against him, her shoulder blades becoming rigid under his hands. Then abruptly she pulled away from him and turned back to the range and started to prod at the bacon with an old wooden spoon.

'It's going to burn,' she said. 'Why don't you go and wake up your friend? We can eat together.'

Buz sighed almost silently, looking at her thin shoulders and the stiff set of her back. For some reason she made him think of fairy tales and mythical stories. He wouldn't be surprised to find that she had been created out of a tall tree and a clod of earth rather than from a man and a woman.

He turned and went back upstairs, leaving her alone in the kitchen. As he pushed open the door to the little bedroom Tod stirred and mumbled something, and then blinked his eyes open, squinting against the strengthening sunlight.

'Buz,' he said blankly, looking about himself. 'Time isit?' he asked in a sleep-slurred voice.

Buz turned his wrist to look at his watch. 'Just past eight,' he said. 'And our patient's up and standing the kitchen cooking us breakfast.'

'Really?' Tod asked with a smile, sitting up in his sleeping bag, looking like some kind of grub emerging from the ground. 'So she must be feeling better?'

Buz darted a look at the door. 'I don't know,' he said in a low voice, sitting down on the edge of the girl's bed. 'I mean – there's something strange about her, Tod. Something not right. I think she's – depressed or something. We were talking – just talking, downstairs – and I mentioned those pups – and she started crying like her whole world was falling apart, you know.'

'Well, she didn't exactly seem a paragon of sanity last night,' Tod said, fighting his way out of the sleeping bag and starting to get himself dressed. 'I mean, what's she doing here anyway, miles from anywhere in a house that looks like it's about to fall into dust?'

'I think the house is actually better than it looks,' Buz said. 'The floors and walls are sound, the roof seems fine. But as for what _she's_ doing here.'

He shrugged expansively, lifting his hands away from his sides and letting them fall back to slap against his hips.

'How did she even get here in the first place?' he asked, going to the window to peer out through the dirty glass at the spreading, empty land around. 'She can't have driven. There's no car but ours.'

'Well then, I guess she walked,' Tod said easily. 'It's a long way, but it's not impossible. I don't know. Or maybe she hitched a lift. Maybe she took a taxi. She's here, and we're here, and we need to work out what to do with her – unless we plan on settling down here for good?'

Buz laughed. 'Not me. No electric lights, no running water, no people. I dig space. I dig simplicity – but this is crazy.'

They sat around the table in the kitchen, eating bacon and thick slices of bread with nothing but the bacon grease to soften them. On the stove a kettle rattled slowly as the water heated up, and once water started to spit from the spout Tod went to lift it off the heat and pour it over coffee grounds in the pot.

Buz watched Mallory as she ate. She lifted her slice of bread to her mouth, but she bit off very little, and every time she swallowed she seemed to be swallowing through that lump of grief that had made it so hard for her to talk earlier. The bacon disappeared with more ease, and he was glad of that. There was something about her pale face and thinness that made it look as if she needed meat rather than just food.

'Do you have any food of your own here?' Tod asked, watching her too.

She shook her head. 'Not really,' she said. 'There are apples growing in the orchard, and there's meat that the dog brings in, and water in the well. But every time I bite into an apple I feel like Eve… It wasn't knowledge she was eating. She was biting into her own womb. Every fruit is a womb…'

Tod and Buz exchanged glances. She didn't look at them as she spoke. There seemed to be a veil across her eyes.

'What I mean is, can you look after yourself?' Tod persisted. 'We followed the dog here expecting to find a litter of puppies. Instead, we found you. But we can't just leave you here if you've got no food and no way to get away from here. We can drive you to the nearest town, if you like. Have you got any relatives, any friends to call?'

Her hand clenched on the edge of the table, her knuckles growing white. She swallowed convulsively, and then took a deep mouthful of water from an old cup.

'I don't want to get away from here,' she said. 'I came here to get away from _there_. I came here to escape from myself. Haven't you ever found a place that seems like more than your own skin? I mean, somewhere that the walls around you and the ceilings and the trees outside make you forget that you have a body, forget that you have a mind?'

'I can't say that I have,' Tod said cynically.

Buz watched silently, watching her eyes and her hands rather than listening closely to her words. She seemed so turned in on herself that he didn't know how to unfold her. Her fingers were moving like the legs of insects, stiff-boned and white and full of nerves.

'Do you have any money?' Tod asked. 'Do you have any way to look after yourself?'

'I have money in the bank,' she nodded. 'But I don't need to look after myself. That's for people who cling on to the need to continue. I don't see a need to continue. I'm just being here. Just being. Nothing more. I'm just waiting until I fall into nature and I don't have to be with myself any more.'

'You mean – you're waiting to die?' Buz asked her plainly.

'Death is such a final word,' she said, looking up at him.

Her eyes almost met his – almost. He tried to make a connection, but his gaze seemed to slip away from the darkness of hers.

'I'm just not trying to live,' she said. 'That's all. I'm tired of living. I'm – just so tired of the effort every day of heart beating, lungs moving, legs walking, hands opening and closing. I don't want to be clothed in myself. I want to be apart from myself. I thought I might find something here. Some way to settle quietly into the fabric of the earth. That's all.'


	4. Chapter 4

4.

Tod and Buz were outside in what was once an orchard, where the trees were lichen-covered and crooked over with time, their branches hanging low to the ground as if they were trying to re-enter the earth. They had left Mallory inside, cleaning the kitchen in an automatic, silent way, the dog tracking behind her as she moved.

'We can't just leave her here,' Tod argued, walking up and down across dead grass and snapping twigs. The fall sun was hot through the leaves and a scent of apples permeated the air.

'I'm not saying we should leave her here,' Buz retorted.

He stopped under a tree heavy with apples and began to pick the ripe fruit and put each one carefully into the old wicker basket he held on his arm.

'You think we should stay? We can't set up home here, Buz,' Tod said, glancing toward the house to be sure they weren't being overheard. 'You, me, the dog, and the crazy lady of Dakota.'

'She's not crazy,' Buz protested, thinking of the girl's dark eyes and tangled hair, and the words that spilled out of her mouth. 'She's just – I don't know – sad. Depressed or something. That's all.'

'She's living in an abandoned house with no food, waiting to die,' Tod said. 'That makes her pretty crazy in my book. We should take her to the hospital or something. Take her to someone who can help her.'

'She doesn't want that kind of help,' Buz said stubbornly. 'You know that. We've seen that kind before. You take them where they can get help, they run away. You take them back, they run away again.'

'So they lock the door,' Tod shrugged.

Buz glared. 'And then what?' he asked, anger surging up in him. 'They strap her down and do – do what? Electric shock therapy or something? Light her up like Broadway at Christmas time? That's always your answer, isn't it, Tod? Lock 'em up. Like you did to that boy in Nevada? If they don't do what _you_ think's right you throw them through the door and lock it behind them? Is that it?'

'_No_,' Tod protested, holding up his hands. 'I don't want that to happen to her any more than you do. I don't mean that at all. But if she's a danger to herself, then – well, we've got responsibilities. We've got a duty to – '

Buz turned to another tree and started twisting apples from their stalks. He picked one that was half eaten into by insects and he threw it furiously into the undergrowth, gaining a small amount of satisfaction from the thud it made as it hit the ground. He boiled up every time he thought of that orphan kid that Tod had carried kicking and screaming back to his prison. That had come as close as anything ever had to splitting the two of them apart.

'How are you going to make an apple pie, with no flour and no fat and no sugar?' Tod asked abruptly.

Buz turned to him, still itching with anger, but Tod was smiling sheepishly, his arms held open as if in surrender.

'I wasn't going to make an apple pie,' Buz said with a shrug. 'I was just going to throw them in a pot, stew them up or something.'

'Well, we've got a little more bacon, some canned food, and not much else,' Tod replied. 'It's about forty miles to Elbow Creek. I can drive there and be back by dinner time with provisions to make dinner time into something more appetising than a mess of apples, bacon and canned potatoes. Just let me know how long we're planning on staying at this local Ritz, huh, so I know how much to buy?'

Buz smiled, the tension falling out of his body. They would never agree over that kid in Nevada – they would never agree over a lot of things – but this was Tod's way of making some kind of peace before another battle flared up. He was worried about Mallory too. Buz could see that.

'Will you give me a week?' he asked. 'After that, we do it your way.'

Tod nodded. 'I'll give you a week. I'll buy a few cans of dog food, too,' he said with a smile. 'But while I'm gone – see if you can find us somewhere better to sleep than on bare floorboards, will you? I want to still be able to walk by the time this week is out.'

'Get some soap, will you?' Buz asked as Tod walked away. 'Maybe some caustic soda or something too.'

Tod turned briefly, saluting jauntily. 'Will do, captain,' he said, before disappearing through the trees.

A minute later Buz heard the engine of the Corvette roar into life, and dust began to bloom through the air as the car crawled away from the house.

Mallory was still in the kitchen when Buz walked in, rubbing at the counter with a tired scouring pad, pushing a dirty puddle of water across the wooden surface. Buz stood silently in the doorway watching for a moment, then he purposely knocked his foot against the doorframe as he walked through, so that she would know he was there.

'Oh!' she said, turning suddenly.

'Sorry,' Buz said, jumping forward and grabbing at her bucket of water as she almost upset it. 'I didn't mean to scare you.'

'I heard the car,' she said. 'I thought perhaps…'

She trailed off, shrugging, an apologetic smile on her face.

'My buddy, he went to get us some food and things,' Buz told her. 'I figured we'd stick around for a bit, just to see you're all right.'

'All right…' she mused, looking up at him with a crooked smile. 'All right is a relative term, isn't it? Don't you think?'

Buz smiled. 'Everything's relative,' he said. 'I mean, the darkness of the shadows is relative to the brightness of the sun. The day's only the day because the night follows behind.'

'And what about the terminator?' Mallory asked reflectively. 'What about that point where one crosses from dark to light, from sunlight to shadow? You could get caught in there, don't you think? You could get addicted, not knowing whether to turn to the blinding sun or the sanctity of the shade. Shadows are kind things, like letting your feet down into the running water.'

'I'd take the sun,' Buz said. 'Er – Mallory – do you mind if I look about the house a bit? My buddy wanted somewhere softer to sleep, see. I promised him I'd try to find a better place while he was gone.'

She nodded, turning back to the counter and starting to scrub again.

'There's the big room,' she said. 'Upstairs, that door just to the right at the top. That's the big room.'

'There's a bed in there?' Buz asked. 'I mean, something intact?'

She nodded again. 'My mamma always bought the best beds,' she said.

'Your _mamma_?' Buz repeated. 'Then this is – ?'

'I was born in the bed in that room up there,' she said. Her fingers suddenly seemed very white and thin on the scouring pad, pressing with more force than was necessary since she wasn't moving the pad at all. 'My mamma lay there all that day and all that night. I was born in the shadows. I didn't come out until it got good and dark, she said. Just before dawn, I slipped out into the world.'

Buz stood in silence, just looking at her.

'This is your house?' he asked eventually. 'All this – '

'All this,' she nodded, gesturing toward the window. 'All one hundred sixty acres. The whole quarter section my great-great-granddaddy took all that time ago when the land was still hopping with jackrabbits and gophers and prairie chickens.'

'This house isn't that old?' Buz asked, looking about him. The place looked maybe thirty years old, but not a hundred.

She shook her head. 'My pappa tore it all down and built anew,' she said. 'He wanted the best place for mamma to bring me up. It was a good place,' she said slowly. 'It was a happy place. We were all happy here.'

'Mallory, what happened to your parents?' Buz ask carefully. He felt strangely afraid of what he might hear, but he had to know.

She shrugged. 'Pappa – he flew in B-17s,' she said. 'One day over Dusseldorf he went down. They sliced that metal shell apart like a cheese wire through butter. Went down in flames. He always wanted to climb mountains, but England was the only place he went. England and the skies above Germany. He never even touched the Alps. Just flew above them like an angel…'

'I'm sorry,' Buz said simply.

He looked at Mallory, trying to judge her age, to work out if she had been perhaps ten or fifteen at that time. He couldn't judge her. Perhaps she was thirty, perhaps twenty-five. In some ways she looked like a child.

'And your mom?' he asked.

'She just went away in the end,' Mallory said quietly. 'She couldn't be without him. She saw me through to college. I came back to see her just before graduation, and that was it. She'd gone then. I found her lying on the floor in that room back there. The parlour, she called it. She was becoming the carpet, becoming part of the house. They uprooted her and transplanted her in Elbow Creek. I wish they'd put her here, though – out in the orchard, under the trees. I should have told them to put her there.'

Buz bit his lip into his mouth, trying to imagine her grief and coming up short. He had grieved for a long time for a family he had never known. He couldn't imagine what it was to grieve for a family that had brought you up and held you and had then been taken away by war and by grief itself. He tried to imagine what it would be like if Tod never returned from Elbow Creek, if his parting words of _Will do, Captain_, had been the last thing Buz had ever heard from his mouth. That was the closest he could come in his mind to losing family.

'I guess – people never go when you expect them to,' he said quietly. 'There's always a breaking off point that comes before you wanted it to.'

'No, people never go when you expect them to,' Mallory echoed, closing her arms about her stomach and holding herself tightly. '_This is the least interval_. That's what Bede said, isn't it? The sparrow flies in from the storm and flickers so quickly through the fire-lit hall, and then passes back to the storm outside. There must be an eternity on either side that we don't know about…'

'I don't know about Bede,' Buz said, shaking his head. 'I don't know about what comes before or after, either. It's _here_ that's the important thing. _Here._ That sunlight coming through the window and the sound of birds outside and that – those apples in that basket on the counter. You can't make anything of what's before or after, Mally. You have to dig what's now. That's all.'

'Mally…' she repeated, as if that were all she had taken from his words. 'My mamma called me that. They called me Lolly in grade school, and they thought Mallory was _so_ sophisticated in college that no one dared to shorten it. But my mamma called me Mally.'

'Do you mind?' Buz asked. 'I mean, Mallory seems a mouthful at times…'

She shook her head. 'Names are just names, after all. Some feel more special than others. I like if you call me that. It reminds me of her.'

'Is it all right if Tod and I sleep in the big room?' Buz asked, remembering how this conversation had started. 'Do you mind us staying for a while – just to see you're all right?'

'I don't mind,' she said. 'No, I don't mind. I like you. You seem like good boys.'

Buz smiled. It was trusting of her to accept the presence of two men in her house while she was alone, forty miles from the nearest town. He was just glad that it was he and Tod who had happened across her rather than someone with fewer scruples. But then, they had only come because they had followed the dog. Perhaps someone with fewer scruples would have just driven past that poor, bedraggled looking creature.

'Well, we do our best,' he said. 'We can help you fix this place up. Make it fit for habitation, you know. I don't see why you can't do spring cleaning in the fall, after all.'


	5. Chapter 5

5.

The day passed softly and quietly. Slowly the dry shipwreck of the house was being turned back into something more homely. By late afternoon Buz was standing at the window of the sitting room methodically wiping grime and smears from the glass and watching the slight movements of leaves and grass in the breeze outside, while Mallory cleaned in the space behind him.

He saw the cloud of dust made by the 'vette rising like a small sandstorm above the trees, even before he heard its engine purring against the softer sounds of nature. It was another minute before he could clearly hear the rumbling coming closer along the dirt track.

'Good thing there's a well here,' he remarked, setting the cloth down and looking around. 'How long is it since it's rained?'

'Oh, long enough. Not too long,' Mallory said vaguely.

Buz smiled and nodded. The room hadn't exactly been filled with conversation since they had begun cleaning in here. Mallory had found a broom and had been sweeping steadily. He had filled an old bucket with water and had tackled the windows and the wooden surfaces of sideboards and occasional tables. The place still looked like it was half-abandoned, but it was a cleaner kind of abandoned than it had been, and Mallory seemed happier and more purposeful the more liveable the place got.

'You know, every time you push that broom my windows get dirty again,' he complained mildly, swiping another layer of settled dust off the damp pane.

Mallory stopped and regarded him with her head tilted to the side. She had tied her hair back with a piece of string, but it was coming loose again and fell down past her cheek now. There were smudges of dirt on her face, and Buz smiled at the vision she presented to him. He could, perhaps, let himself feel for this girl. Perhaps, if she weren't so enmeshed in some hidden sorrow.

'You didn't strike me as a housewife,' Mallory said. 'Did you used to help your mamma clean her windows?'

'I didn't have a mamma,' Buz told her flatly.

The windows in the orphanage hadn't been cleaned very often, either. Perhaps that was why he loved to get the glass glittering and clear. He remembered watching the men outside on ladders with chamois leathers and buckets of suddy water, and the white-clad women inside sometimes wiping a rag over the panes. It was like a treat to have those glass panes suddenly clear, letting the thin winter light or the bright summer sun shine through. Sometimes he had used a handkerchief and a gobbet of spit to the same effect, and then hidden the dirty handkerchief deep in someone else's pile of laundry.

'Everybody had a mamma,' Mallory replied, and he shrugged.

'Well, they must have been all out when it came to my turn in line,' he said. 'I didn't get exposed to standing on a stool helping to dry the dishes, baking bread, peeling vegetables and all that jazz. I grew up in an orphanage. They did all that somewhere nice and sanitary, out of sight. It could have been done by robots.'

'Well, you clean well for someone who didn't get taught by his mamma,' Mallory said, gazing at him steadily.

Buz tried to read the expression behind her eyes. He usually gleaned some kind of reaction from people when they discovered he was an orphan. Mallory seemed to show a mild, sad curiosity, but nothing else.

'I like to do a job and finish it, not to have to do it over and over,' he said finally, giving the window another wipe.

'Maybe you best clean the windows in another room,' she said ambivalently. 'Where I'm not sweeping.'

Buz dropped the cloth into the bucket and stood with his hands on his hips, watching her as she started to push the broom again. He couldn't work her out. There was something inside her that was paining her. That was obvious. She was worn out and tired. She could only work for a half hour before sitting down and resting for a while. There was a shadow inside her that stayed with her whichever way she turned. But somewhere, he thought, there was a bright and interesting person. Somehow she needed to be peeled clean of whatever it was hanging over her, and inside he would find a person who could live with joy in this strange, isolated, beautiful house.

'Well, Tod's back,' he said as he heard the car engine stutter and fall silent somewhere outside. 'So I'm laying off for the day. Maybe you can stoke up the fire in the stove so we can fix some dinner?'

'I'll do that,' she nodded, resting the broom against the wall. The dog was curled up beside one of the moth eaten armchairs, and she reached down to stroke its head. 'You said he was going to buy something for her to eat?'

Buz nodded. 'Yeah, he was going to. I'll go see what he got.'

He took the bucket with him and as he walked out through the house door he threw the water in an arc that glittered in the low sunlight before striking the ground with a splash. He could see the Corvette just through the trees, as close to the house as Tod could drive it. The paintwork looked gold in places where the sun was striking it.

'Did you get what we needed?' he called out as he made his way through the trees.

Tod was just getting out of the car and slamming the door behind him. The shadows of the moving leaves mottled his skin as he turned to Buz.

'Oh, I got plenty,' he said in a meaningful tone. 'Nice little place, Elbow Creek. One grocery store, one hardware store. Church and a handful of houses. Gas station too, thank God, or I wouldn't have made it back again.'

'What do you mean, you got plenty?' Buz asked in a low voice, coming closer. 'You didn't just mean groceries.'

Tod went round to the trunk and opened it. Buz glanced at the assortment of brown paper bags in there, and the shopping poking out of the top, but he asked again, 'What do you mean, you got plenty?'

'Relax,' Tod said. 'Nothing bad. Not really. But I asked around about the abandoned house forty miles back along the road, and I just found out a little more about Mallory here.'

'Like what?' Buz asked defensively. He wasn't sure why, but he felt certain that Tod was going to say something he didn't like. He felt like he needed to protect Mallory because she would not lift a hand to protect herself.

'Just how her mom and dad lived here, like she said, and her dad died during the war. He was Richmond Fleet. You ever heard of him?'

Buz shook his head briefly.

'He wrote a whole series of books back in the thirties,' Tod continued. 'Very popular stuff. My dad had a shelf of 'em in his library. So I guess he made enough money to rebuild this place and left enough to send Mallory off to a good school. She can't be penniless, at any rate. It was her mom's place originally. When she took it over from her folks her husband tore the whole place down and built it new, just for her.'

'And what about Mallory?' Buz asked, glancing over the raised lid of the boot to be sure they were alone.

Tod shrugged. 'Always a bright kid. Went off to college and graduated with all the honours. Published her first book before she got her degree.'

Buz smiled. He felt a strange sense of protectiveness to the girl after the past day and night with her.

'And that's it?' he asked.

'Not quite,' Tod said. 'Just that she got married before she got her degree too. Guy at the university – I think he was getting his PhD, the store owner said. As far as that guy's concerned, Mallory's living happily with her husband in Connecticut.'

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Buz mulled on that fact through the long evening and into the night. He hadn't considered that Mallory had a husband. She certainly wasn't wearing a wedding ring. He had noticed no jewellery on her at all. She was one of the most simply dressed women he had ever seen, in her slim black clothes, with her loose hair and her lack of adornment.

It didn't seem right to mention the absent husband to Mallory. She ate dinner less silently than her last meal, but their talk was mostly confined to remarking on the dryness of the land and what had been grown here when it was farmed and how she had loved growing up in this beautiful isolation. Buz sat and ate and thought about this unknown factor in her life, but he said nothing and Tod stayed mercifully silent.

'You mind sharing a bed?' Buz asked Tod later, upstairs in the big room.

Mallory was already in her own room, already deep in sleep with the black dog lying on the floor beside her. Tod and Buz had stayed downstairs for a little longer, but there seemed little point in sitting down there in lamplight, talking in hushed voices, with the dark pressing against the windows and the knowledge that tomorrow there would be just as much work to do as today.

The bed was wide and empty with sheets still on the mattress, but something seemed strange in sleeping in that bed that had been shared by Mallory's parents. Part of Buz made him want to sleep on the floor instead of on that bed – but he thought that he would change his mind as soon as he had felt the mattress under him. One night sleeping on boards was enough.

'I don't mind sleeping in the same bed if you don't,' Tod said lightly, looking around the room. There was a dressing table opposite the foot of the bed, its oval mirror foxed with age, and small scatter of possessions left there as if they had never been touched since the owner's hand laid them down.

'I don't mind,' Buz nodded.

He took the sleeping bags and laid them out neatly on top of the mattress.

'I'll sleep on it,' he said. 'But I prefer my own bed linen.'

'I'm with you there, buddy,' Tod laughed, but his laugh sounded strange and too loud in the abandoned room.

Buz touched his finger to his lips, frowning and nodding toward the door.

'I don't think a nuclear explosion would wake her, from how she looked when I peeked in earlier,' Tod said, but he lowered his voice all the same.

'Yeah, she seems really tired,' Buz said in a worried voice. 'I mean, she was working hard and everything. She had the will. But it tired her out really fast doing all that stuff.'

'You think she's sick somehow?' Tod asked in concern. 'I mean, she didn't seem too concerned about living or dying.'

'I don't know,' Buz shrugged. 'Tired and sick aren't always the same thing, you know? And there are a hundred different kinds of sick, and they're not always in the body.'

He set down a couple of things on the bedside table and then got up onto the bed and slipped himself into the sleeping bag. The mattress was surprisingly comfortable beneath him considering its age. He patted the bed beside him.

'Get in. The water's lovely,' he said, and Tod laughed and climbed into the sleeping bag beside him.

'I'm going to talk to her some more tomorrow – try to work out what's inside her mind,' Buz said as Tod settled down.

'Good luck with that,' Tod half laughed. 'But I'd take a torch and a piece of string if I were you, to find your way out again.'

'You know, it's not always dangerous getting into people's heads,' Buz said. 'You should try it more often. You might like what you find.'

'Be careful, Buz,' Tod said seriously. 'She's married.'

'So, she's married,' Buz said in a low voice, staring at the bedroom wall and the patterned wallpaper on it. 'What does that mean anyway, really?'

Tod shuffled in his sleeping bag and the wide double bed creaked beneath him

'It means she committed herself to another man,' he said simply.

'I'm not in love with her, Tod,' Buz assured him. 'I feel sorry for her, and I want to help her. Nothing more than that.'

'Well, I do too,' Tod said. 'And we are helping her. I mean, when we found her she was curled in the corner in the dark. Now she's moving and talking, and we're getting this place half-way back to being liveable. All I'm saying is, don't get too involved – emotionally, I mean. I know you. You throw yourself into these things like you're jumping into deep water. Before you know it your head's gone under and you don't know which way you're facing. And when the husband turns up you're liable to end up in a fist fight.'

'I'm not gonna end up in any fist fights,' Buz promised. He turned over in his sleeping bag and pulled the oil lamp a little closer over the bedside table. 'You ready for me to turn this thing out?'

'Yeah, I'm ready,' Tod said. 'Sleep well.'

Buz lifted the chimney and blew out the lamp, and darkness settled over the room.

'Yeah, you too,' he murmured.

He closed his eyes, somehow seeing in the dark the patterns of birds and leaves on the wallpaper on the other side of the room, and through it and out the other side to where Mallory was curled in her bed like a sleeping dog, dark and uncertain of the world. Somehow he would find out what was in her head. Somehow he would.


	6. Chapter 6

6.

It was very early.

Buz opened his eyes and lay staring at the opposite wall, numb with sleep at first. The light in the room was thin and pale gold and he watched a patch of it on the wallpaper moving very gradually as the sun outside tracked slowly across the sky.

'Shoulda pulled the curtains,' he murmured to himself.

The curtains were rich and heavy, but neither he nor Tod had thought to draw them across the many-paned window when they had gone to bed. With the darkness of night pressing against the panes it had been hard to imagine the brightness of the morning.

Buz pushed a hand over his eyes to block out the light, but he couldn't recapture his sleepiness.

He wriggled out of his sleeping bag carefully. Tod was curled on his side with an arm flung up over his face and his mouth part open. He looked like a child, lost in the depths of sleep. Buz slipped his feet to the floor and yawned. The air felt cold after the enclosing warmth of the sleeping bag, but that would be driven away soon by the rising sun.

He padded across the room and carefully pulled the curtains closed, half expecting them to fall in a pile of dust and moth-eaten fabric. But they didn't fall, and the oblique golden light was shut out of the room. He knew that it would probably take a nuclear bomb strike to wake Tod, but at least now the sun wouldn't fall directly on his eyes.

He turned his wrist to look at the time on his watch. Not long past six. Well, there was a long day of cleaning ahead of them anyway. There was no harm in starting early.

As he went softly down the stairs he could tell by the sounds that he was not the only one awake. He found Mallory in the kitchen, holding a big white sheet over the edge of the sink and scrubbing at it furiously.

'Hey, what're you doing?' he asked, padding up behind her on bare feet.

She jumped as if she had heard a shot, scrunching the sheet down suddenly into the sink and pressing it under her hands. Buz looked into the white ceramic depression and saw a swirl of rusty red moving in the water about crimson soaked folds of the sheet.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' he said, suddenly embarrassed. He took a step backwards. 'I didn't mean – ' But then something struck him and he said, 'Are you all right? I mean, you're not suppose to lose _that_ much are you, when it's your – I mean, when it's _that time_.'

He could feel his face growing warm. He wasn't embarrassed by many things, but there were certain things about women that were kept between women, and he didn't know how to approach them.

'What do you know about women?' Mallory asked him without turning. Her voice was tight. 'You with no mamma, and I guess no sisters either?'

'I know enough,' Buz said. 'I've been around, you know. I'm not exactly a fresh fall of snow, untrod by human foot.'

'No, I guess not,' she said. 'What man is?'

Buz raised his eyebrows at the tone of bitterness in her voice.

'We're not all dogs roaming the land looking for bitches, either,' he said defensively. 'I figure there's got to be something in between. Some middle ground, you know. I mean, no man's an island but it doesn't mean we're all Manhattan at rush hour.'

She was silent. She moved her hands finally and carried on rubbing at the sheet. She pulled the plug and let the water drain out, and Buz looked at the pail next to her.

'I'll fetch you more water,' he said, and took the bucket out to the well.

The air still had the chill of night in it, but the sun was warm on the side of his face as he hauled up the water from deep in the ground. He looked down into the well, thinking how there was a whole other world down there, deep down where nothing could go but worms and burrowing creatures

He brought the water back into the house and lugged it up onto the surface by the sink. Mallory was standing with her hands limp on the sheet like dead fish, as if she had lost all hope of removing the stain.

'Have you tried putting salt in the water?' he asked her as he poured the water into the ceramic bowl. 'I mean, I heard that's supposed to help with blood. I guess it's worth a try?'

'Maybe so,' she said, and reached up with her wet hands to lift a stoneware jar from the shelf nearby. She poured a trickle of salt into the water, watching the clodding grains stutter and drop. 'All the basics of life,' she murmured. 'Blood and salt and water. Earth and air. White sheets. Have you ever noticed how blood smells like roses?' she asked suddenly. 'Every summer the roses bloom and it's as if the air is scented with blood, as if when you're walking in the garden you're walking through Flanders and you can smell the sweet, sick scent of death.'

'I – er – haven't noticed that,' Buz said, taken aback. 'To me, roses smell like roses. Look, why don't you let me have a go?' he asked, reaching forward to stop her hands moving.

He felt foolishly squeamish about putting his hands into the bloody water, because of where the blood must have come from – but he didn't show his reluctance. It was stupid. He was here to help Mallory. It was just blood, nothing else.

Mallory stepped back silently from the sink and raised her hands.

'Be my guest,' she said tiredly.

Buz took the folds of sheet in both hands and began to scrub them against each other. The work was strangely calming, monotonous and pleasing. Slowly the stains were becoming fainter and the water more infused with rust. He went out to get another pail of water and came back to see Mallory sitting at the table, her head resting on folded arms. He set the pail down and went to her.

'Hey,' he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. 'Hey, Mallory. Are you okay?'

She raised her head slowly and smiled, but her smile was like weak sunlight trying to break through thick clouds. Her face was sheened with tears.

'I don't know,' she said haltingly. 'Blood and roses. I can't run away from myself, no matter how I try. It's the black dog, isn't it? The black dog that follows. There's a shadow behind me, Buz,' she said desperately. 'I can't get away from it. It's not _him_. It's me…'

'Him?' Buz asked softly. 'Your husband?'

She stared at him, her eyes suddenly dark with something that could have been fear. 'What do you know about my – husband?'

He shook his head, wondering at the look in her eyes. 'Nothing. I mean, Tod, he went into the town and he asked about this place, and some folks there told him that you got married when you were away at university. That's all.'

She rested her head back on her arms, her eyes staring unseeingly across the kitchen.

'My husband,' she murmured. 'Jim told me I'd never be able to do it. He told me I wouldn't be able to get away. I guess he was right. I guess I was stupid. I came all this way, but all I could think of to do was to come home. To come right home like a bird flying back to the nest. Too stupid to be born, me. Too stupid to even die.'

'Jim?' Buz asked. He sat down at the table near her and touched a hand to hers. 'Jim – that's your husband?' He felt that he already didn't like Jim.

She barely moved her head as she nodded, but she said, 'That's him. Yes, that's him. I thought – I felt – ' She raised her head again suddenly, and her eyes were desperate. 'I couldn't breathe around him. It was like being up on the summit of Everest. The air's rarefied up there, you know. Not everyone can breathe up there. I was suffocating. Always the conferences and the papers and – I tried to be up there with him, but I know I'm too stupid. He always told me I was stupid. _My dense little explorer_, he always called me. I'm always poking at things but I can't truly understand. And I thought if I got away from him I might be able to _breathe_, you know? I thought I might be able to take a gasp of air and feel alive again.'

'_You're_ stupid?' Buz repeated, staring at her in surprise. '_You? _Tod said you got all the honours at college, top of your class._ Magna cum laude_, or whatever those cats call it. He said you published a book, that you were always a bright kid.'

She shrugged and looked away, pulling at her dark jumper with her fingers as if she were trying to pull it closer about herself.

'I don't know,' she murmured. 'I don't know about that. I just wanted to breathe some fresh air. I felt like I was dying back there in a third floor apartment, just me and Jim and my stupidity like a cloud hanging about me. I was useless to him. I really was. He told me so often enough.'

'So this guy told you you're stupid, huh?' Buz asked, his hackles starting to rise. 'So, what? He picked you up from the university and had you hang on his arm and be the little wife, and he told you that you were stupid and useless and dense so he could feel like the big man, the big academic? And then what? And then – '

'And then I was stupid enough to fall pregnant,' she said thinly, as if she were speaking through a block in her throat, closing her arms tightly about her abdomen.

Buz stared at her. 'You're – '

He looked between her flat stomach and the blood on the sheet in the sink, and the words seemed to die out of his mouth. He went to the sink and pushed the sheet down further so that the red stain could not be seen, and then pulled up a chair to sit near her.

'Mally, what happened?

'I had a baby,' she said in a paper thin voice. 'I had a baby, I lost it. She came early. She came right here in this house, in my bed upstairs. She never saw another face but mine. I saw – her fingers like clinging vines, fingernails like pearl. Her eyes were so dark I fell into them. I held her to me for two days. There was nothing wrong with her. She had milk on the corners of her lips. She cried. She held onto me like a little creature. And then – she was gone. Just gone, like her soul had floated away.'

Buz swallowed. Her hands were thin and clawing on the table top, and he reached out and covered them with his own. His eyes moved around the room. He didn't know what to say.

'I don't think my body knows,' Mallory said. 'I've tried to tell myself she's gone. I knelt on the ground and I scraped out a grave and I put her into it, wrapped in a blanket. I couldn't cover her over for hours. I couldn't until I was sure… She looked like a Russian doll. And – when I knew she was really gone, I put her under covers. I bedded her down. She's next to that poor dog's puppies.'

For a moment her eyes seemed opaque and without emotion, and then the opacity fell as a trickle of tears, and the grief came over her. Buz pushed his chair closer to hers and wrapped his arms around her, feeling the shaking move through her like the aftershock of an earthquake. Her hair smelt of dust and earth and human sweat, like the smell of all the days cleaning and the warm night just gone rising up from her.

He wondered how she could suddenly feel so empty to him. He hadn't known about the baby, but now its absence made a hole that he felt he could fall into. It seemed so cruel that her body had to continue to bleed even though she had lost the reason for the bleeding.

'You know, we should maybe take you to see a doctor,' he said eventually. 'You should get yourself checked out.'

She shook her head mutely, her face muffled against his chest.

'I can't,' she said thickly through the tears, her voice moving through his ribs. 'I can't go as Mrs James Andrews but I don't have insurance under any other name. And when they saw me they'd ask about the baby, and then they'd come and take her away, and – '

Buz's arms tightened as her distress increased. He stroked a hand over the tangles of her hair and rested his chin on the top of her head and thought.

'Well, you're a woman,' he said finally. 'I mean, do you know if you're all right? Do you know if the bleeding is – well – '

She shrugged. 'It seems like what Dr Bralver said it would be like. I can't go to a doctor, Buz. I won't. That's all. I won't.'

'Okay, okay,' he said. 'No doctor. What about your husband? I mean, did he know about the baby?'

She shook her head tightly. 'I couldn't tell him. He never wanted children. How could I tell him? He'd be so angry… I just – I started wearing loose clothes, and he never noticed, and then I left before it went too far. I left and I just wandered – and I ended up here. I was afraid he'd find me here, but I don't think he ever found out where the place was. He never came here.'

'Oh, Mally, Mally,' Buz murmured. He suddenly felt very close to her, as if he had known her all his life, as if he had gained a baby sister. 'Are you afraid of him?' he asked suddenly. 'I mean – did he hit you or anything?'

She shook her head. 'Jim never laid a finger on me in his life.'

'Just did it all with words, huh?' Buz asked her. 'Are you going to go back to him?' he asked.

'No,' she said after a small, dead silence. 'No. I can't breathe up on his heights. He didn't like me to write. He didn't like me to think. His thoughts were too big. There wasn't room for mine. I need someone smaller.'

'You need someone who makes _you_ feel bigger,' Buz told her. 'Someone not all wrapped up in himself, see? You need to go out there and find a man like that.'

She looked up and him and smiled, and suddenly he felt as if he were the younger brother and she held the wisdom of the world.

'I don't want to find anyone for a while, Buz,' she told him. 'I just want to be here, on my own. Me and my black dog. The real one, not the one in my mind. I want to watch the grass and the flowers grow over where my baby's sleeping, and see the frost come over the ground and then go away again in the spring, and the flowers and the grass come up again. Maybe then I'll go out looking. Maybe then I'll be ready for that.'


	7. Chapter 7

7.

It was a small and ordinary patch of turned dirt out in the garden. It was hard to believe that the earth had been scraped for anything more momentous than planting seeds. Buz stood and looked down at it, and wondered what it had been like for Mallory laying her own child down in the ground and covering it over. There were too many thoughts hung up inside him about babies. When he looked at one he couldn't imagine turning away and leaving it for someone else to look after. He couldn't imagine what it must be like to lose a baby that you _did_ want.

He had found a big whetstone wheel in the tangles of briars near the house, the iron and wood frame long since destroyed by the weather. It had taken time to wrestle it out from the clinging tendrils of plants and to clean off the dirt and green bloom from it, but Mallory had looked at it and nodded and smiled, and he had brought it to the grave to act as a lasting memorial.

'I might plant flowers in that centre hole,' Mallory said as he laid it down on the earth. 'Something wandering, something that will come out and lay itself all over the ground hereabouts. Something for those puppies too.'

Buz straightened up from positioning the stone over the grave and put his arm around her shoulders. She felt thin and fragile, but some kind of catharsis had begun when she had confessed to him in the kitchen about the small soul that she had lost. Some of the dark shadow seemed to be lighter and easier around her.

'Buz, what's going on?'

Buz turned to see Tod walking across the sun-struck grass, rubbing his eyes as if he were still half asleep. He had obviously dressed hastily. His shirt wasn't buttoned up, showing a sprinkle of freckles across his chest like constellations in the night sky.

'You look like a hay stack after a hurricane,' Buz said, nodding at Tod's sleep rumpled hair.

'You wouldn't recognise a hay stack if it fell on you, city boy,' Tod said tartly, but he smoothed his fingers through his hair all the same. 'What's going on, Buz?' he asked, his voice serious again, his eyes moving between Buz's arm around Mallory's shoulders and the stone on the ground.

Buz glanced at Mallory briefly, and she nodded her head very slightly. He squeezed his arm on her shoulders and then let go.

'Come back into the house, Tod. I'll fix us all some pancakes.'

'_You'll_ fix us pancakes?' Tod asked doubtfully. 'I don't know. It feels a little early to be exposed to your cooking, Buz.'

'You'll love 'em,' Buz assured him. 'Just like Mrs Kiedrowski taught me.'

As they walked away he saw Mallory kneeling down on the ground beside the grave, the black dog sitting beside her as if it understood her pain.

'What is that, Buz?' Tod asked in a low voice as they reached the house. 'Is that where those pups are buried?'

Buz shook his head. 'Well, yeah, they're there too. But they're not the only thing. Mallory had a baby, Tod,' he said quietly.

'_Had_ a baby?'

Tod made as if to turn, and Buz grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the house.

'Leave her be,' he said. 'She needs time on her own. We just laid that stone down and she's all tangled up in her own thoughts. Yeah, she _had_ a baby,' he nodded. 'Here, in this house, alone. It died, and she buried it there. That's the black dog that's following her. That's the cloud that's covering up her sun. No, we can't do anything,' he said as Tod turned again as if to go outside. He knew Tod too well. He would run to authority – to doctors or whoever seemed right to straighten out the mess of a woman who had run away from her husband and whose baby had died. 'She won't see a doctor. She doesn't need a doctor. We just need to leave her alone. Let her grieve, okay?'

'Okay,' Tod said doubtfully. 'Poor kid,' he murmured as he followed Buz into the kitchen. 'I can't imagine…'

'No, me neither,' Buz said. He picked up a stack of cut wood and started to feed the pieces into the stove, hoping the dying embers from earlier would be enough to set flame to the new fuel. 'But I think there's a lot of strength inside her, Tod. She's kinda broken up right now, but she's going to get better. She looks like the kind of kid who's going to make it. I just – I wish I knew what I could do for her, Tod.'

'What we are doing,' Tod said prosaically, gesturing at the house around them. 'Get this place cleaned up and fit to live in. Hope she'll be strong enough to do the rest herself. The only other wild card is that husband.'

'That husband wants to meet me in a back alley on a moonless night,' Buz said darkly. 'There's a hundred ways to hurt someone, and it's not all physical. He sounds like an expert in the non-physical ways, but I could teach him something about the others.'

'Yeah,' Tod nodded. 'Well, if she thinks she's got the strength to keep away.'

'_I_ think she's got the strength to keep away,' Buz said firmly.

He picked up an old mixing bowl and began to pour flour into it and then cracked an egg into the soft white powder. The contents fell silently into the flour and he stood looking at it for a moment, thinking how many lives were aborted before they had even begun. The world was a strange place. It was full of death, and people just shrugged and moved on. Even Mallory, in the end, would move on.

'Well, you're right, anyway, Tod,' he said as he added milk to the mixture. 'We can't do anything about the husband for her. We can't do her grieving for her. What we've got to do, is to just keep on doing this. Keep on cleaning up and sorting out and make her a home to live in. She'll get sorted out in time. Maybe she'll go back out into the world again and meet some guy, and he'll be a good one this time.'

''''''''''''''''''''

As they walked away from the house in the strong sunlight of midday the place was a strong contrast to how it had seemed on that first night. In the dark, with the headlights striking it obliquely through the trees, it had looked like no more than a tumbledown shack. But it had never been as ruined as it had looked, and a week of hard work had turned the place back into a home again. The smoke from the kitchen fire rose steadily from the chimney and drifted away into the sky. The windows glittered reflections of the sun. The weeds had been pulled away from the boards and the grass had been shortened with a scythe and then an old push-powered mower, and the front door was painted and looked welcoming instead of forbidding.

Two days ago they had all driven into Elbow Creek and Mallory had bought a car that stood next to the Corvette at the end of the dirt track. It seemed to symbolise a rejoining of the world for her.

Now she walked between Tod and Buz, the dog at her heels and her arms linked in theirs until they reached the cars. The shadow that hung over her had been lifting all the time, and it seemed thinner still in the bright sunshine that brought light to her hair and made her eyes shine.

'You're sure you'll be okay now?' Tod asked her as they stopped by the Corvette. 'I mean, no electricity, no phone. This place is a long way out. You'll be all right?'

She nodded her head. 'I'll be all right,' she promised. 'I came here like an animal looking for a place to bed down and have my baby. Then I lost her, and – well, I've been through a thousand skins since then. I don't feel like curling in a chair and hiding from the world, but I'm not ready to join the throngs. It's all I want, Tod – to be alone for a while, in peace. I'm glad you two found me. I'm glad you shared this week with me and did all that work. But I'm ready to be alone now.'

Buz pressed a hand to her arm and smiled. 'You'll be all right,' he nodded. 'You'll be just fine. And if we ever travel back this way we'll stop in and see you.'

'I'd like that,' she smiled. She pulled at the straps over the cases on the luggage rack, and nodded. 'All secure. You're ready to go.'

Buz took her shoulders in his hands and kissed her forehead.

'So are you, kid,' he said. 'I want to see your next book in the bookstores and your picture on the dust jacket, smiling like you mean it. Will you promise us that?'

'I promise,' she said. 'Now go, before too much time rolls by.'

The car seats were warmed by the sun, and Tod and Buz sank into their places as if they were regaining a home. For them, the Corvette was home, as much at the house behind them was Mallory's home. Tod turned the key and the engine roared to life, and the wheels began to press dirt and broken stalks of grass beneath them as they turned.

It was a slow drive back to the road. The clouds of dust raised by the Corvette's wheels turned the trees into an obscure haze and hid the house from view. The black dog chased the car for a few hundred yards, barking at the wheels, but then it turned back and it too was swallowed up in the dust. The sun shone down, unyielding, and the car moved on.


End file.
